The Trentadue Case: A Coverup That Won’t Stay Covered

By Paul Craig Roberts

CNN recently reported that “the Justice Department is
re-examining its investigation into the 1995 death of a federal
prisoner that the victim’s family alleges was murder at the hands of
the government.”

The victim was Kenneth Michael Trentadue. At 7 AM on
August 21, 1995, officials from the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office
arrived at the new Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center for the body
of a man recently picked up for parole violation who allegedly was a
suicide by hanging. The astonished state officials saw a body with
scalp split to the skull in three places, throat slashed, and a body
completely covered in blood, bruises and burns.

As law requires, the officials asked to see the cell in which
the alleged suicide occurred. Federal officials pulled rank and refused
on the grounds that a federal investigation was underway.

A federal investigation was not underway.

The state officials told the prison officials that the body’s
condition required FBI notice and protection of the cell as an
undisturbed crime scene. Associate Warden Max Flowers, however, ordered
the cell to be cleaned before any investigation could be done. Flowers
claimed that medical staff informed him that Trentadue was HIV-positive
and that it was urgent to remove the infectious blood.

Trentadue was not HIV-positive.

Dr. Fred B. Jordan, the Chief Medical Examiner of the state of
Oklahoma, was stunned at the destruction of evidence by federal
authorities and at the way federal officials blocked his office from
carrying out required duties. In a memo to the file dated December 20,
1995, Dr. Jordan described his frustration over being stonewalled by
top Department of Justice officials in Washington. He recorded that he
confided to the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Oklahoma City that “I
felt Mr. Trentadue had been abused and tortured.”

Two years later Dr. Jordan said on a Fox News Interview (July
3, 1997):

“I think it’s very likely he [Kenneth
Trentadue] was murdered. I’m not able to prove it. I have
temporarily classified the death as undetermined. You see a body
covered with blood, removed from the room as Mr. Trentadue was, soaked
in blood, covered with bruises, and you try to gain access to the scene
and the government of the United States says no, you can’t.

“They [the federal
government] continued to prohibit us from having access to the scene
of his death, which is unheard of, until about five months later. When
we went in [the cell] and luminoled, it lit up like a candle
because blood was still present on the walls of the room after four or
five months. But at that point we have no crime scene, so there are
still questions about the death of Kenneth Trentadue that will never be
answered because of the actions of the U.S. government.”

Dr. Jordan’s effort to do his job brought him under great
pressure and harassment from federal authorities. Realizing his peril,
on August 25, 1997, Dr. Jordan wrote to IRS Commissioner Margaret
Richardson:

“The requirements of my job as
chief Medical Examiner for the State of Oklahoma are currently bringing
me into an uncomfortable juxtaposition with the United States
Department of Justice. In order to protect myself from retribution, I
would like information as to how to request a protective audit from
your agency. By this, I simply mean a standard audit in order to avoid
having your agency used to harass me as I proceed with my inquiries
into a death that directly relates to the Federal Transfer Center in
Oklahoma City.”

In a handwritten memo to his file dated October 22, 1997, of a
telephone conversation with U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D, ND), Dr.
Jordan recorded: “confirmed my feelings that the investigation was
crippled, the decedent was at the least beaten, we haven’t found the
truth and probably won’t, reiterated my lack of trust in the Fed. gov’t
and the Dept of Justice in particular.”

Unable to secure from Dr. Jordan a ruling that Trentadue’s
injuries were self-inflicted, the DOJ sought the cooperation of Dr.
Bill Gormley, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Dr. Gormley came to
the same conclusion as Dr. Jordan and came under the same pressures. In
a memo to file dated May 30, 1997, Kevin Rowland, Chief Investigator in
the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s Office records a telephone call he had
from Dr. Gormley:

“The basic purposes for his
call was to 1-find out what they [DOJ] are up to because he was
very suspicious, and 2-ask if I might be able to explain why they only
wanted certain testimony from him, since he told them that we had
already given them the truth. He was troubled that they only seemed
interested in him saying it might be possible these injuries are
self-inflicted.”

Senator Orrin Hatch (R, UT) threatened the DOJ with Senate
Judiciary Hearings on the case. However, FBI documents (Dec. 5, 1997
and Jan. 28, 1998) indicate that FBI agents succeeded in pulling the
wool over the eyes of Senator Don Nickles (R, OK) and using him to
prevent Hatch’s investigation.

Federal harassment of, and accusations against, Dr. Jordan
built to the point that on March 12, 1998, the Assistant Attorney
General of Oklahoma, Patrick T. Crawley, wrote to the US Department of
Justice:

“The real tragedy in this case
appears to be the perversion of law through chicanery and the misuse of
public trust under the guise of some aberrant form of federalism. In a
succession of either illegal, negligent, or just plain stupid acts,
your clients [FBI, DOJ, Bureau of Prisons] succeeded in
derailing the medical examiner’s investigation and, thereby, may have
obstructed justice in this case. As more and more information is
revealed in this case, primarily through the efforts of Jesse Trentadue
[lawyer brother of victim], it appears that your clients,
and perhaps others within the Department of Justice, have been abusing
the powers of their respective offices. If this is true, all Americans
should be very frightened of your clients and the DOJ.”

Despite the protection of the Oklahoma Attorney General,
sufficient pressure was brought against Dr. Jordan to cause him to
abandon his position. On November 28, 2000, at the civil trial brought
by Jesse Trentadue against the United States, Dr. Jordan was asked: “You
didn’t find any evidence of beating or torture, did you?” He
answered: “No, there is no evidence to substantiate beating or
torture.”

Despite Dr. Jordan’s changed testimony, the presiding federal
judge in the Trentadue civil suit saw enough evidence that much was
amiss to award the Trentadue family $1.1 million for suffering
harassment and intentional infliction of emotional distress by the
federal government.

But, as all evidence of homicide in the case was destroyed,
whether intentionally or negligently, or withheld by the DOJ, the
charge of murder could not be proven.

Whatever the deal with the DOJ, apparently it only covered Dr.
Jordan’s testimony in the Trentadue civil trial. Two years later on
December 11, 2002, under oath in a subsequent deposition in a libel
case brought by a FBI agent against a magazine that covered the story,
Dr. Jordan said: “Because of the extensive bruising of the body, the
cut throat, and the general appearance of the body, we felt that the
death should be investigated as a homicide.”

In answer to a question whether he was harassed by the federal
government, Dr. Jordan answered: “I don’t think there’s any question
I was harassed by the Department of Justice from the very beginning of
this, the 21st of August when we were denied access to do a job we’d
been summoned to do.”

A believer in the system, Jesse Trentadue has not given up. He
has brought a Freedom of Information Act suit against the DOJ.
Trentadue’s suit, rather than a rediscovery of integrity by the DOJ,
probably explains the recent CNN report that the DOJ is reopening the
case. By reopening a criminal investigation, the DOJ does not have to
release the documents demanded by Trentadue’s civil suit.

It has always been a puzzle why a man picked up on a parole
violation would be murdered in his cell by federal agents. Recently an
explanation has turned up.

Kenneth Trentadue might have been a victim of mistaken
identity. Misidentified as the missing John Doe, Tim McVeigh’s alleged
accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing, he might have been beaten and
tortured in an effort to obtain a confession. The autopsy report shows
Trentadue with a highly elevated caffeine level, amounts certainly not
available to a person held in isolation.

High doses of caffeine are used to increase pain under
torture.

In trying to find the truth, Jesse Trentadue is a brave man.
In the last of a five-part series on the Trentadue case in the McCurtain
Daily Gazette, J.D. Cash reports that FBI agents, desperate to
silence the Trentadue family, have been conducting a criminal
investigation into Jesse Trentadue for several years. Mr. Cash writes:

“Contained in an internal FBI
investigation report obtained by this newspaper, a FBI agent discusses
legal strategies to use against one of their most vocal and effective
critics: ‘by listing Jesse Trentadue as subject in another
investigation, that would place him as a target of one of our
investigations and this would also prohibit Jesse Trentadue from
testifying before the Federal Grand Jury.’”

Law and order conservatives, who believe that the only wrong
ever done by the criminal justice system is to under-punish the guilty,
have much to learn from the Trentadue case.